One of the biggest trends in entertainment today is true crime dramas about serial killers. Forbes reported in 2020 that it was a “great year for fictional serial killers.” And now, two years later, our fascination with mass murder is continuing, but…
How Trump’s latest comments on Israel align with evangelical Zionism
Donald Trump is in the news again making negative statements about American Jews while flattering his evangelical fanbase. In my piece last week, I wrote about how the dispensationalist obsession with the end times led evangelicals to embrace the Christian Zionist…
Our journey from private school to homeschool to public school
The Baptist youth group I grew up in was made up of three main categories of students — the Christian school students, the homeschool students, and the public school students. Every fall, as we gathered on Wednesday evenings just a few…
The biblical view from the Tower of Babel
Few stories in the Bible highlight the complexities of deconstruction and the way it divides us into speaking very different theological languages like the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. “What did Babel’s builders do wrong? Why did God punish…
Schools and spanking: Isn’t it time we stopped using religion to justify violence?
“Make education violent again” seems to be the slogan for a public school district in Missouri. The Cassville School District decided on June 16, 2022, to bring back spanking after parents requested for the schools to spank their kids. In…
Desiring God is denying reality
Last week, it was the almost humorous riff on beards as signs of God’s favor on manly men. This week, it’s a not-at-all funny critique of Critical Race Theory and intersectionality — by a white man who is the father…
‘So you’ve been deconstructing, huh? What do you believe now?’
There is perhaps no greater trend in American Christianity than deconstructing the theology and ethics of white evangelicalism. Books, articles, podcasts and even music are being created daily to explore the reasons why so many people are leaving the faith…
How The Jetsons and Westworld help us think about robots, personhood and faith
The internet droned on last week about the future of artificial intelligence and the human race when people began to compute that George Jetson was born on July 31, 2022. The Jetsons premiered in 1962 with a storyline that was set in 2062…
New data show America’s challenge is not because ‘both sides are wrong’
There is a popular trend among some evangelicals to criticize both sides of political and religious debates equally while proposing a third way that appears to be above the fray. They might say, “While the right says this and the…
There’s a straight line from eugenics to ‘biblical family values’ to white supremacy and the anti-abortion movement
Pro-life conservative evangelicals erupted into unanimous jubilation at the news of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. But while united in their celebration, they are divided in their vision for the future of the pro-life movement and unaware…
What I learned listening to others who have left the faith
In the wake of the Guidepost report that Southern Baptist Convention executive leaders covered up knowledge of sexual abuse for decades, we are reminded once again of how religious abuse has deeply traumatized millions of our neighbors. One of the ways evangelicals…
The tangled web of evangelical opposition to abortion while believing in original sin, eternal conscious torment and the mysterious age of accountability
Few topics enflame conservative evangelicalism’s self-righteous ire like the topic of abortion. We’ve all seen social media posts from friends that depict or describe abortion procedures in the most graphically violent ways in order to shock us. Who could possibly…